We know, too, something of the outward circumstances which added to his difficulties. Married during his agnostic period to a freethinker, his intense respect for human freedom forbade him to force on his wife his own convictions, or even to bring his adored children to baptism against their mother’s will. For this refusal he was himself denied access to the sacraments; and hence this impassioned Catholic, for conscience’ sake, lived and died out of communion with the official Church. No one will really understand Péguy’s position or the meaning of his poems, unless this paradoxical situation, and this constant element of frustration and incompleteness in his experience, be kept in mind. He was in one sense an exile, ever gazing at the beloved country which he knew and understood so much better than many of its citizens. Deeply religious, he lived at odds with his religious world. Capable of the strangest inconsistencies and refusals, though sparing himself nothing of the anguish they involved, he could make on foot a pilgrimage to Chartres to pray for the life of his sick child; yet would not face the struggle necessary to make those children members of the Church in which he believed. “Je ne peux pas m’occuper de tout. Je n’ai pas une vie ordinaire. Nul n’est prophète en son pays. Mes petits ne sont pas baptisés. A la sainte Vierge de s’en occuper!” Himself, he felt called upon to devote his powers, without distraction, to that missionary propaganda in which the mystical and combative sides of his nature found creative expression, and to which his poetry and much of his prose is consecrated. “Il y a tant de manque. Il y a tant à demander,” says St. Joan to the patient nun who seeks to teach her resignation: and here she expresses Péguy’s deepest conviction. There is so much lacking that men might obtain of joy and peace and love. Action no less than prayer is needed; every soul must take its share in meeting the world’s need, for we are the accomplices of ill if we do nothing to prevent it. There was never any place in Péguy’s eager and restless heart for that “other-worldly” mysticism which achieves the love of God at the expense of love of home and fellow-men; for religion in his view was an affair of flesh and blood, not of pure spirit—not merely transcendental, but concrete, national, fraternal, even revolutionary. On this side his mysticism represents the spiritualization of that activist philosophy which was coming into prominence in the formative years of his life, and could not fail to exert a powerful influence on him.